I have been a Hillary Clinton supporter, and a vocal one, for quite a while (I was a Hillary Clinton supporter, some said, before I even knew I was). I didn't write the words "it's over" last night with any joy, or any ease.  I wrote them because that's what I've learned supporting Hillary Clinton this year - politics is about the practical, clear-eyed look at things as they really are, not as we might like them to be.

As a party, we need to understand what happened, and why last night was the effective end of the campaign for Hillary Clinton. There are, naturally, details to work out, plans to be made, graceful exits to be set up. But last night, things changed; just not, necessarily the things some people think changed.

I had a chance this morning to catch part of John McCain's speech in Tampa, while getting the family car checked out, and posted this originally on my blog while watching. I've written a lot about health care since I began blogging, partly because I worked for a time in medical advertising, and partly because of the experience I had growing up with my Mom, a healthcare educator with considerable depth of knowledge in the field. I encourage anyone looking to find out more about the proposal to click on the various links, which provide a wealth of additional detail and data.

McCain has clearly learned something about the rhetoric of the healthcare debate; to his credit he did a compelling job laying out the problem - he was more frank than I've seen Republicans be about admitting that the uninsured are a real and significant problem (the right has wasted a lot of energy disputing the notions of 47 million uninsured, trying to blame the lion's share on illegal immigration and temporary unemployment, to no avail). He also emphasized - just as rightly - the challenges of rising costs and access to healthcare, and how insurance serves as the way into the system, which hurts people without coverage.

Which is what makes his proposed "solution" so ludicrous.

I was actually worried, as he laid out the problem, that McCain had actually had a "come to Jesus" moment during his time off and moderated his initial proposal, made months ago. I needn't have worried: McCain is still pushing the notion of some combination of increased health savings accounts and tax credits to individuals ($2,500 to individuals, $5,000 to families) as a means to reduce costs of insurance. This, he says, will stimulate such a level of increased competition for coverage, that insurance costs will drop, and everyone, like magic, will be insured.

Yawn.

Let's just steamroll through this, shall we? Here's what's wrong with the proposal:

Although this is my first entry at MyDD, I have been blogging for about a year and a half on my own; the election, and writing about it, has helped attract readers, and bolster my confidence as a writer, things for which I am grateful. It's a little odd to me that I would choose a dicey subject like our racial divides as a jumping off point, but it's something I care about (and have written about, as the links will show), and I think someone has to try.  My intent, of course, is not to offend, but to invite a dialogue, and a way to get into a difficult subject. Whether it succeeds or not... is up to you.

It doesn't surprise me that one outcome of this week's primary results is that the tensions of talking about the dynamics of this election season have gotten rougher; a lot of Obama supporters - which could easily be described as "the media" - have had to readjust to the fact that Clinton's win in PA was solid, as good as her supporters expected, if not better, and made it clear that things we'd been saying were turning out to be true. And that, in turn, has led to some expected hand-wringing about the kind of divide the results exposed.

Put another, less PC way... it's gotten hard to ignore that some white people don't vote for Barack Obama.

The question, of course is why.  And in order to discuss that, naturally, we need to talk about some difficult subjects. And race, really is only part of it.  It's also class, and economics, and cultural tensions... but simmering under and around all of it is people talking frankly about race in a way that most people find uncomfortable, a way that has to acknowledge perceptions and prejudices without, necessarily, giving into them.

And I mean that both ways: some, I think, struggle with a way to talk about working class white voters that doesn't resort to "redneck" or "trailer trash" type stereotyping; the opposite, of course, is sweeping generalizations about black people that  are clearly prejudiced if not flat out racist. Complicating it are perceptions, stereotypes and casual notions many of us hold, things we rarely admit, or discuss with strangers.